You have to give credit to John Oliver - there's very few comedians who are able to make equal-parts funny and frightening monologues like he does.
While he's covered coronavirus on multiple occasions, be it testing and contact tracing, how the US has utterly mishandled it, or even just misinformation, it's been done with a level of care and diligence that really isn't all that common.
This time around, however, it's about something pretty insidious and hard to nail down - conspiracy theories. As Oliver readily admits himself, he's prone to it himself, offering up the fact that he himself lingers over the theory that the royal family had Princess Diana killed - even though there is little evidence to back it up.
As he points out, conspiracy theories help to put massive and chaotic into a narrative and cater to a human tendency called proportionality bias - which essentially assumes that big events must have big causes. The example Oliver cites is something everyone knows - the assassination of JFK, and then contrasts that with the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. In one instance, a lone gunman caused untold chaos because it ended in his death, yet in the other event, he failed miserably.
It's a really fascinating exploration of human psychology, the internet's ability to disseminate false information at lightning speed, and how we're all trying to make sense of what we're going through at the moment.
Take a look.
